For several grade-school years in Tucson I went to class on Martin Luther King’s birthday. The generation of my father’s grandfather (who hadn’t been sorry to see King shot) had given way to my own grandfather, who thought that “they” were only five hundred years out of the trees. Being a kid, I’d try to argue with him; but he would have found the argument childish from anyone’s mouth, since his side of it was pure paternalism. Our venal car salesman of a governor thought it a matter of hardheadedness and thrift, setting aside expensive pieties for the business of business. “We have a state that is less than five percent black and a work force that is lucky to get six paid holidays a year while the state workers already get ten paid days off—and now they want to give them an eleventh paid holiday.” Or, speaking straight to the black community: “You folks don’t need another holiday; what you folks need are jobs.”

A holiday for you folks. In a world of competing factionalisms, the concept of civil rights can’t mean anything other than a chit to a single faction’s advantage. In many ways that governor of ours has been the closest thing in my own experience to our president-elect; though that fellow’s record of malfeasance did at least get him removed from office in the end.

I hope I have made clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect – - completely removed in fact – - even as we ourselves are.

Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012.
It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.

Texts and images copyright (C) 2013 Paul Kerschen. Layout adapted from the Single A Tumblr theme by businessbullpen. The Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) has zygodactylic feet, leaving X-shaped tracks with ambiguous direction. The Pueblo and Hopi used the X symbol to mislead evil spirits. Border folklore in the early twentieth century held that a roadrunner would lead a lost traveler back to his path. In Mexico the roadrunner is known as paisano, countryman.